Efforts are being made into understanding the true nature of what it means for someone to be happy. But according to Daniel Kahneman, known for his works in behavioral economics, this understanding is based out on flawed foundations. There are several mental mind maps according to the him, that restrict the correctness of these methods.
The first is the vagueness that's associated with someone being happy in their life", because it is applied to many different aspects, and is confused with "well being".
The second one is the inability of individuals to distinguish between happiness in the current moment i.e. experiences about daily life events and the happiness that comes with the memory of it. That is experienced happiness is different from memory happiness.
The third and the final one is that more that often things are labelled "Unhealthy for well-being whilst dumping their importance in some other realms." simply because of a lack of focus on what really matters.
So for the second one, Kahneman recites an incident in which a man reported having
a terrible experience listening to a symphony due to a screeching sound at the end.
Now, the economist here presents us with the real fact, that in spite of consuming
20 minutes of lovely music, what made the person report a terrible experience was
not his experience with the song itself(which was, for the most part wonderful),
but rather the memory of it, which was made worse by the piece at the end, and that
memory, was all that dictated his judgements.
To support this, Let's have a look at a study that was carried in the 1990s,
where two patients were asked to report the intensity of pain they felt every minute,
during a surgical procedure.
Now we can clearly see on the graph that the pain administered to B had lasted way
longer than A's so to answer the question of who "felt the most pain overall", B
would be a straight one, except that it isn't.
A reported having a much worse experience of the surgery than B. Dan explains
why:
B was exposed much longer to the procedure, so yes his "experiencing" self was
worse off but the whole procedure ended with a intensity spike much lower than that
for A. So the memory that B had to retain of the pain was not as bad as A's.
While even though A had been exposed for a smaller period of time, the procedure
ended for him with a much greater pain spike. So all that he had gotten to retain
was a terrible memory which dictated how he would report the "overall experience",
because endings are a very critical part of a story.
So the remembering self, and the experiencing self are quite distinct, and the key
distinguishing element here, points out the author of "Thinking fast and slow" is in the handling of time.
For the experiencing self, the longer something lasts, the more joyous/painful it becomes,
while the remembering self is content with the few crucial moments at the end of it all.
Take vacations for example, the experiencing self rates a two week vacation, to be
twice as good as a one week. But for the remembering self, these two are the same,
unless something new is added to the story, or the ending changes.
Kanheman labels the remembering self as the dominant one, because of the role that it
plays in decision making. Excluding off the table decisions, most of the decisions
in our lives are made on the basis of our "past experiences" that we "remember".
So if we have to choose for example between two brands, we do so on the basis of
what we remember our experience was, with either.
Since we have found out the two distinct aspects of handling events, so we try to see the meaning of happiness for either of these.
For the experiencing self, says kahneman, we can measure that by getting a rough estimate
of how happy are a person's day to day moments, in which he lives.
And for the remembering self, we can think about how "satisfied" the person is when
he thinks about his life.
These two are very different things, and are not highly correlated, which kahneman labels at 0.5, which means that we would not be able to decide how "happily a person is living" by knowing how "happy he labels his life to be" and vice versa. But overall, for the satisfaction of the individual, kahneman says, being with people we like, is the most dominant factor.
Then for the third reason of "focussing", what Dan says is that we are two different beings entirely when we think of how we'll live versus how we actually live. So since the remembering self plays an important role in decision-making, we are relying heavily on the happiness of the remembering self. So when we make a decision say, to switch houses, even though the switch might not bring about a vast change in the experiences, we would THINK we are happier because of how the remembering self would remind us all but the right things at our previous home.
Similarly, I hope that your experience of this blog as a reader would have been wonderful and insightful, If not, this meme at the end should at least make the "memory" of it delightful.
PS: For more insights into the distinction between the Thinking self and the Remembering self, do read : https://g.co/kgs/CiGhXJ
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